“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. He is working with beliefs, juggling them. The cold symptoms began some time ago, and have been kept while he makes up his mind to dispense with the more familiar ones. The cold does not involve physical slow motion.

It brings to the surface some other physical feelings, however, that are connected with the usual symptoms. He is meant to see the connection. The sinuses are involved. The feeling of being full through the body—heavy—has a connection with the full-head feeling, initially, of sinus origin physically.

When he began clamping down on physical spontaneity, tensing of the head, neck and jaw areas was involved, leading to a sinus condition. The cold is meant to lead him backward mentally and physically through the group of beliefs that initially cause the entire condition.

It begins with the sense of unworthiness mentioned often, but it led to a pattern of behavior where he began to hold his breath, so to speak, tense the muscles in self-protection. To hold the breath however as in fright.

The cold symptoms also have operated to increase his circulation. The body combating the (in quotes) “new” symptoms is also creating antibodies that affect the old symptoms. He has had a better appetite. The body has been calling for more food and nourishment, and quite unconsciously he has been consuming a larger amount of peanut butter, which is giving him several nutriments that he needs.

The fact is of course that he doesn’t need any of the symptoms, but in the interrelationship of his beliefs the cold results as a method of understanding, and of bringing about certain necessary physical changes.

Intuitively he began to understand the physical connections between that kind of cold and sinus involvement, and his condition. (Gestures to include the whole body.) A cold is something that comes and goes, and is not permanent, and he is to see his other symptoms in that same light—not as he saw them earlier, as a permanent-like situation.

He quite understands how in childhood he adopted colds and discarded them, and is to see then the other symptoms in the same light. For these reasons the cold was adopted. He needed to see how he himself in a relatively harmless (underlined) incident in miniature, so to speak, could create such conditions as the cold, and in growing out of it see how he can grow out of the other symptoms.

All, then, a lesson in the nature of beliefs as he applies them to his own body and behavior. A test case. “I will give myself this, and get rid of it, and then apply what I have learned to this other situation that has been bothering me.”

The public, or the people, have also been involved in this test case. He needed to know that people saw and recognized the symptoms of a cold so that when he was rid of it he could see for himself that they no longer perceived those symptoms in him.

He was earlier afraid, you see, that his symptoms otherwise had become so real to others that they would continue to perceive them. In other words for a test case he produced a miniature symbolic situation physically materialized. Solving it is meant to give him the confidence that it can be done in this other area.

Rich Bed is highly important to him personally and creatively. He would feel out in the cold no longer for several reasons, mainly because the book so beautifully combined the continuity of his earlier life with his later activities.

Then the cold did serve to drastically improve his health. Because he did not understand the nature of his beliefs however the improvement, while lasting for some time, deteriorated. This time the body’s overall condition, using the method adopted, required a longer period of such stress-transformation, and so the cold condition has been of longer duration.